Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google,...

Countries differ substantially in the extent to which more productive firms are large and/or are becoming larger and less productive firms are small and/or becoming smaller. A challenge for both emerging and advanced economies is that achieving such static and dynamic allocative efficiency...

The Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) provides data on business dynamics for U.S. firms and establishments with paid employees. This briefing highlights some key features of the most recent BDS update, which now has data through 2009 - the trough of the recent recession. The...

Newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), allow unprecedented tracking of business dynamics for U.S. firms and establishments. This is the fourth in a series of briefings to highlight some key features of the data. What is the role of young...

The pace of business dynamism and entrepreneurship in the U.S. has declined over recent decades. We show that the character of that decline changed around 2000. Since 2000 the decline in dynamism and entrepreneurship has been accompanied by a decline in high-growth young firms. Prior research...

We develop a preliminary version of an Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (ILBD) that combines administrative records and survey data for all employer and nonemployer business units in the United States. Unlike other large-scale business databases, the ILBD tracks business transitions...

It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather differences in demand-side...